A while ago I participated in an online story writing contest. The participants had to write a small 500 words story but everything had to be done in only 30 minutes on the contest’s website. I tried my best to write a fascinating story and checked for all the spellings using in-built spell checker of Firefox, before submitting it. But when they displayed the results, I was taken aback by the number of grammar mistakes that appeared in my story and sad to say perhaps that is why I did not win the contest. Some of the mistakes we very basic like forgetting to use upper case for the first letter of a sentence. Actually I could have avoided all these mistakes, had I known about LanguageToolFx earlier. LanguageToolFx is a Firefox extension that can check your typed text for style and grammar at the click of a button.
After the installation of LanguageToolFx in Firefox, it places a new icon in the Firefox toolbar. Anytime you want to check typed text (in any text field, or text box), you can select that text box or text area and then click on the LanguageToolFx icon in the toolbar. You can also right-click on any selected text or text field and choose to check it with LanguageToolFx from the context-menu.
At first LanguageToolFx tries to check local server (for those running a LanguageToolFX local server) and then connects to its web service on the internet to check for the style, spelling and grammar mistakes. Then results are displayed either in a popup overlay window or in the sidebar. For each of the errors or mistakes, a possible correction is also displayed which makes it easy for you to correct them.
In the settings for LanguageToolFx extension, you can choose a default input language (by default, it tries to identify the language on its own), your mother tongue, URL of local server, enable spell check,various shortcuts to for checking the text and displaying the results either in popup or sidebar and more.
Conclusion: LangaugeToolFx is a very productive extension for Firefox users. It can check your typed text for style, spelling and grammar at the click of a mouse button. The results are displayed instantly and give you suggestions for possible corrections.
You can get LanguageToolFx for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/languagetoolfx/.
Can one disable ‘grammar’ advise against “sentence too long” or “too complex” wherein such is not much more than an inadvertent commentary on societal lexical juvescence?